Press Release 14 16 Oct 2006

Contents

Reality checks: some responses to the latest Lancet estimates

Hamit Dardagan, John Sloboda, and Josh Dougherty

Summary

A new study has been released by the Lancet medical journal estimating over
650,000 excess deaths in Iraq. The Iraqi mortality estimates published in
the Lancet in October 2006 imply, among other things, that:

On average, a thousand Iraqis have been violently killed every single day
in the first half of 2006, with less than a tenth of them being noticed
by any public surveillance mechanisms;

Some 800,000 or more Iraqis suffered blast wounds and other serious conflict-related
injuries in the past two years, but less than a tenth of them received
any kind of hospital treatment;

Over 7% of the entire adult male population of Iraq has already been killed
in violence, with no less than 10% in the worst affected areas covering
most of central Iraq;

Half a million death certificates were received by families which were never
officially recorded as having been issued;

The Coalition has killed far more Iraqis in the last year than in earlier
years containing the initial massive "Shock and Awe" invasion
and the major assaults on Falluja.

If these assertions are true, they further imply:

incompetence and/or fraud on a truly massive scale by Iraqi officials in
hospitals and ministries, on a local, regional and national level, perfectly
coordinated from the moment the occupation began

bizarre and self-destructive behaviour on the part of all but a small minority
of 800,000 injured, mostly non-combatant, Iraqis;

the utter failure of local or external agencies to notice and respond to
a decimation of the adult male population in key urban areas;

an abject failure of the media, Iraqi as well as international, to observe
that Coalition-caused events of the scale they reported during the three-week
invasion in 2003 have been occurring every month for over a year.

In the light of such extreme and improbable implications, a rational alternative
conclusion to be considered is that the authors have drawn conclusions from
unrepresentative data. In addition, totals of the magnitude generated by
this study are unnecessary to brand the invasion and occupation of Iraq a
human and strategic tragedy.